Related papers: Making refactoring decisions in large-scale Java s…
Large language model (LLM) coding agents can generate working code, but their solutions often accumulate complexity, duplication, and architectural debt. Human developers address such issues through refactoring: behavior-preserving program…
It is well known that software needs to change to meet new requirements. The synchronization of software architecture models and implementation is of high importance to keep the architecture documents useful and the software evolution…
Just-in-time defect prediction (JIT-DP) aims to predict the likelihood of code changes resulting in software defects at an early stage. Although code change metrics and semantic features have enhanced prediction accuracy, prior research has…
The complex software systems developed nowadays require assessing their quality and proneness to errors. Reducing code complexity is a never-ending problem, especially in today's fast pace of software systems development. Therefore, the…
Test smells arise from poor design practices and insufficient domain knowledge, which can lower the quality of test code and make it harder to maintain and update. Manually refactoring test smells is time-consuming and error-prone,…
Several refactorings performed while evolving software features aim to improve internal quality attributes like cohesion and complexity. Indeed, internal attributes can become critical if their measurements assume anomalous values. Yet,…
Despite the availability of refactoring as a feature in popular IDEs, recent studies revealed that developers are reluctant to use them, and still prefer the manual refactoring of their code. At JetBrains, our goal is to fully support…
Detecting refactorings in commit history is essential to improve the comprehension of code changes in code reviews and to provide valuable information for empirical studies on software evolution. Several techniques have been proposed to…
Context: Software systems are in continuous evolution through source code changes to fixing bugs, adding new functionalities and improving the internal architecture. All these practices are recorded in the version history, which can be…
Software Quality is a major concern in software engineering development in order to be competitive. Such a quality can be achieved by a possible technique called Refactoring where the systems external behavior of the system is not changed.…
Empirical results in software engineering have long started to show that findings are unlikely to be applicable to all software systems, or any domain: results need to be evaluated in specified contexts, and limited to the type of systems…
Refactoring tools in popular Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) can introduce unintended behavioral changes or compilation errors, a persistent challenge that undermines developer trust in automated transformations. Traditional…
The feature space (including both input and output variables) characterises a data mining problem. In predictive (supervised) problems, the quality and availability of features determines the predictability of the dependent variable, and…
Widely used complex code refactoring tools lack a solid reasoning about the correctness of the transformations they implement, whilst interest in proven correct refactoring is ever increasing as only formal verification can provide true…
Software quality is critical in modern software engineering, especially in large and evolving codebases. This study analyzes the evolution of software quality metrics in five successive versions of the open-source Java testing framework…
Modern software development methodologies include reuse of open source code. Reuse can be facilitated by architectural knowledge of the software, not necessarily provided in the documentation of open source software. The effort required to…
When engineering complex and distributed software and hardware systems (increasingly used in many sectors, such as manufacturing, aerospace, transportation, communication, energy, and health-care), quality has become a big issue, since…
Evaluating Software testability can assist software managers in optimizing testing budgets and identifying opportunities for refactoring. In this paper, we abandon the traditional approach of pursuing testability measurements based on the…
Given a learning problem with real-world tradeoffs, which cost function should the model be trained to optimize? This is the metric selection problem in machine learning. Despite its practical interest, there is limited formal guidance on…
During compilation from Java source code to bytecode, some information is irreversibly lost. In other words, compilation and decompilation of Java code is not symmetric. Consequently, the decompilation process, which aims at producing…